Abstract
This paper deals with the problem of situation-specific knowledge systems which operate in people's local life-worlds, and universal values as they are enshrined in larger programmes working towards human liberation and emancipation within national and international organizations. The author traces the threats to people's survival and life-worlds posed by globalization and new economic policy, and focuses on movements which protect structures of solidarity within the life-world and which attempt to transform systems like capitalist production, the market, financial and trade organizations and the media. Within this organizational process the hegemonic development paradigm which works towards accumulation of profit is challenged in favour of a new system geared to what the author terms “life-centred production”, “production of life and livelihood”. She then analyses how the process of transformation is undermined by the usurpation of feminist concepts by the state, development agencies and communal religious forces. In this context the concept of women's empowerment is questioned, because it is often used to co-opt women into the existing system. The author then examines the practical experiences of slum dwellers in South India whose survival is threatened by the new economic policy and whose cultural world is severely affected by the politicization of religion. She poses the question of the identity of a people's movement and ends with a perspective on the cultural and organizational resources needed for an alternative development paradigm.